WASHINGTON â€” President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate.

Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet â€” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy F. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury â€” suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.

The choices are as revealing of the new president as they are of his appointees â€” and suggest that, from its first days, an Obama White House will brim with big personalities and far more spirited debate than occurred among the largely like-minded advisers who populated President Bushâ€™s first term.

But the names racing through the ether in Washington about the choices to follow also suggest that Mr. Obama continues to place a premium on deep experience. He is widely reported to be considering asking Mr. Bushâ€™s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on for a year; and he is thinking about Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant, for national security adviser, and placing Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary whom Mr. Obama considered putting back in his old post, inside the White House as a senior economic adviser.

â€œThis is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,â€ David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clintonâ€™s and Mr. Geithnerâ€™s appointments leaked. â€œItâ€™s teaching us something about Obama: while he wants to bring new ideas to the game, he is working from the center space of American foreign policy.â€

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If Mrs. Clinton is taken from the â€œTeam of Rivalsâ€ model, Mr. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, is from the Team of Neutrals.

â€œHeâ€™s no liberal,â€ said a former colleague at the Treasury Department, where he managed the American response to the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.

At the time Mr. Geithner developed a reputation as the ultimate pragmatist, putting together a package of more than $100 billion in aid to halt the financial contagion. That turned out to be a training session for his role, a decade later, in the bailouts of Bear Stearns, A.I.G. and the injection of nearly $350 billion in Congressionally authorized money, whose exact use has become something of a political football.